EDUCA TION IN THE "CIVILIZING MISSION" OF THE WEST 505
But Wilberforce, Grant, and others of the humanitarian and evangelical party
known as the Clapham sect persisted and achieved more success an the next twenty-
year review of the company's charter in 1813. This time Parliament authorized (but
did not require) the company to give financial support (10,000 rupees a year) to
schools and other institutions that would be used for "the revival and improvement of
literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduc-
tion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in
India."13
While the Indians were referred to as "learned natives," at least this was a step
up from the terminology of "coloured races" and "peasants" which was used to apply to
Africans. The current of superior attitude reflected in such terms was strong and deep
among generations of Englishmen, and just as strongly and deeply resented by
generations of Indians. Nevertheless, the British government was again committed to
the use of public funds for government schools abroad nearly fifty years before it did
so in England itself; and the Christian missions were allowed to extend their work to
all company territories. The most successful school established in these early years was
that of Alexander Duff of the Free Church of Scotland established in Calcutta. His
work became a model for those who would promote English education in India rather
than an oriental education.
Despite the mandate of the East India Company Act of 1813, the company
officials moved ever so slowly; in the manner of stodgy bureaucracies they spent many
years in making surveys of indigenous education. They interpreted the act to mean
that oriental literature should be "revived," not English introduced. They were also
very reluctant to interpret the act to mean that they should establish colleges as in
England but rather should extend their support to Hindu and Moslem scholars for
private study. But by 1823 a Committee of Public Instruction was set up in Bengal to
administer the company schools which consisted of one English college, six oriental
colleges, and a number of vernacular primary schools. The point of view of the
Committee of Public Instruction was almost solidly orientalist in 1824.
But while the officials in India were going their orientalist way, the pressures at
home were building up for an Anglicized education. The Utilitarians had joined the
evangelicals in their generally low estimate of Indian languages, literature, and culture,
plumping hard, as might be expected, for usejul studies. James Mill himself from 1817
took up the cudgel for the necessity of educational reform in India. Meanwhile, in
India a new Hindu college was established in Calcutta by David Hare and by the
energetic Indian campaigner for English studies, Rammohun Roy, the outstanding
nineteenth century Indian modernist. This college was the first Hindu institution to
promote Western learning.
When in 1823 the Company's Committee of Public Instruction, ignoring all the
ferment, planned to establish in Calcutta a Sanskrit college to complement the Islamic
college there, the pot really began to boil. Despatches from London, written by James
13 H. Sharp, Selections from Educational Records, Part 1,1781-1839, Superintendent Government
Printing, Calcutta, 1920, p. 22.